Published: 
By  Eric Williamson
Robot programmers think inside the box.
The graduate and advanced undergraduate students in Nicola Bezzo's Autonomous Mobile Robots course, along with Bezzo's colleague Roman Krzysztofowicz in the bowtie, gather to find out which team’s TurtleBot will take the prize. (Photos by Matt Cosner)

In the tale of the tortoise and the hare, slow and steady won the race.

In the competition among robots working their way through a carboard maze last week at the University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science, speed and precision formed the winning combination.

Some of these are people who never programmed a robot before, so it's quite impressive.

Nicola Bezzo
Nicola Bezzo

The maze runners were part of associate professor Nicola Bezzo’s annual Autonomous Mobile Robots competition, from his course of the same name.

"It's cool that the class can achieve this level of autonomy in less than a month," said Bezzo, who teaches in both the Department of Systems and Information Engineering and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and is affiliated with UVA's Link Lab. "Some of these are people who never programmed a robot before, so it's quite impressive."